Leading global IT and business solutions provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced findings from its global study titled, Winning in a Business 4.0™ World, which benchmarks large companies in their Business 4.0 growth and transformation journeys by mapping their adoption of four critical business behaviours: driving mass personalisation, creating exponential value, leveraging ecosystems, and embracing risk.

2018 was a huge year for social media, with many changes to navigate including privacy scandals, a new algorithm at Facebook, the impact of influencer marketing, and the rise of Instagram. Social media marketers found themselves having to aim for targets that were not only moving but morphing into new entities altogether. For brands that need to reach more consumers and raise brand awareness on social media, here are the biggest trends from 2018.

When Hootsuite was born back in November of 2008, four-year-old Facebook had 100 million users (2.27 billion today) and new kid on the block Twitter had just 6 million (336 million today). The world was without Instagram (more than 1 billion users today) as it wouldn’t exist for another two years, and Snapchat (300+ million users today) wouldn’t come on the scene for another three.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. In a nutshell, NLP gives machines the ability to read and understand human language. A sufficiently powerful natural language processing system manages to enable natural-language user interfaces and the acquisition of knowledge directly from human-written sources, such as newswire texts. Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval, text mining, question answering and machine translation. 

2018 was a big year for KPop, and with a new global record of 5.3 billion Tweets last year, Twitter continues to show that it's a great place to find out what's happening with KPop and to talk about it with KPop fans around the world. The top 20 countries that tweeted the most about KPop in 2018 have been:

Mobile channels have become more compelling to the perpetrators of ad fraud, since mobile accounts for an increasing proportion of digital ad spend. But, while there are many strategies and solutions available to mitigate the impacts of ad fraud, separating the capabilities from the spin can be difficult, which is why TrafficGuard provides some thoughts and predictions on ad fraud prevention:

2019 promises to deliver incredible new developments in the way designers approach customer experience. Improvements in personalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling independent designers and marketing professionals alike to create experiences that truly delight their customers.

Asking which industries are going to be most impacted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years and decades, is much like asking someone in the 80s which industries are going to be most impacted by computer chips and computer software. In 1980s, it was possible to see that computers were going to revolutionize retail and medicine, but not to forecast the advent of Amazon or Taobao. Prediction of AI’s future influence is likely even harder than was the case for earlier technologies, due to the exponential nature of change in an era of unprecedented connectivity.

The 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and six other countries formally adopted the first set of intergovernmental policy guidelines on Artificial Intelligence (AI) this month, agreeing to uphold international standards that aim to ensure AI systems are designed to be robust, safe, fair and trustworthy.

Looking at the Swiss full-service digital agency Namics’ predictions, we feel that we are on the right track with many of the trends we forecasted to gain momentum in 2019, including the following:

Last year has been a turbulent year for social media in many ways. To protect their privacy, Penny Wilson, CMO at Hootsuite explained, many social media users now use more often closed channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat. This gives companies the opportunity to build a new kind of customer relationship, especially with many customers using instant messaging for interactions such as support requests.

Against a global backdrop of persistent social, economic and cultural change, Zeno Group’s new global study on “Barriers to Employee Engagement” looks closely at employees’ concerns about their workplace and how those issues, left unchecked, are standing in the way of effective engagement. The study revealed widespread concern among employees on current business topics like job loss due to automation and generational differences on issues such as work-life balance, with the overall findings pointing to a clear call to action for communicators and management.

In today’s connected world, businesses are prime targets for cyberattacks, and unintentional missteps can result in critical exposure of consumers’ sensitive personal information.

Vodafone just launches its 2019 Global Trends Report, highlighting customer centricity, ethics and purpose, and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as key business priorities for the next 12 months.